Water Bagels and Water Elsewhere

I'm going to do this while my Internet is behaving. The weather today was absolutely miserable, damp, dreary, and raining. It poured this morning...right when I had to go to my dentist appointment, of course. I showed up in Dr. Heider's office literally dripping wet. (And yes, I do own an umbrella. A very good one from the 70s that I got in a yard sale two years ago, shortly after moving here. I was even wearing my red sweater with the hood. The dentist office is just a few blocks from me and I saw no reason to ask for a ride.)

Today, I finally got that tooth I broke last year filled. I never did anything about it because it didn't hurt. Turns out that there was some decay in there, too. Other than the needle needed to numb my jaw (I HATE needles!) and the fact that one of the drills was so noisy, I had to resist looking to see if a herd of elephants were charging down the White Horse Pike. When all was said and done, the broken tooth was filled, and Dr. Heider says the other teeth appear to be on the mend, including the one with the really bad gums.

I spent the rest of the day at home, baking and doing yoga and stuff online. I'd originally planned to get my paycheck at the Acme, then run a few small errands in the Audubon Commons shopping center behind them, but I finally decided I've done enough running around in the rain. My remaining errands could wait. I e-mailed Verizon about my phone and Internet troubles (I was going to call them, but I wanted to borrow my landlady's phone, and by the time she came home, I didn't really feel like going out in the weather) right after I got in. The Internet went down three times, but never for more than a minute or two each time, so I'm hoping that bodes well for tonight.

I tried something a little different with my bread-baking this evening. Despite the disaster with my pretzels, I decided to try another popular bread snack. Bagels are surprisingly simple to make. They only need to rise for about 40 minutes all together, and you actually let them boil in water for a few minutes to give them their chewiness and shiny crust. Unlike my pretzels, they came out perfectly. I was running out of regular flour and made them with part-wheat flour, and that gave them a nice, nutty flavor and a deeper color.